Plant breeders are fast tracking genetic advancements in food crops to keep pace with global warming and an ever-increasing human population. Farmers and plant breeders are in a race against time as the world population is increasing, demanding more food but hampered by the limited cultivable land available. Warmer temperatures have helped extend growing seasons in some areas but brought drought and pests to others.
Plant breeders are fast tracking genetic advancements in food crops to keep pace with global warming and an ever-increasing human population. Farmers and plant breeders are in a race against time as the world population is increasing, demanding more food but hampered by the limited cultivable land available. Warmer temperatures have helped extend growing seasons in some areas but brought drought and pests to others.
Lee Hickey, a plant geneticist of University of Queensland in Australia said that they face a great challenge in terms of feeling the world, and according to statistics the world will have about 10 billion people on the planet by 2050, which means 60 to 70 percent more food will be needed to feed everyone. He also claimed that this is a more significant challenge in the face of climate change and diseases that affect our crops that are also rapidly rising.
But plant breeding is a slow process. Developing new kinds of crops, higher yield, more nutritious, drought-and-disease-resistant can take a decade or more, using traditional breeding techniques. So plant breeders are working on increasing the pace.
Dr. Hickey's team has been working on "speed breeding," tightly controlling light and temperature to send plant growth into an overdrive. This enables researchers to harvest seeds and start growing the next generation of crops sooner. Inspired by NASA research on how to grow food on space stations, their technique tricks the crops into the flowering stage early by blasting blue and red LED lights 22 hours a day and setting the temperatures between 672 degrees Fahrenheit. Last November, in a paper in Nature, they showed that they could produce up to six generations of wheat, barley, chickpeas and canola in a year, whereas traditional methods would only yield one or two.
On Monday in Nature Biotechnology, Dr. Hickey and his team highlight the potential of speed breeding, as well as other techniques that may help improve food security. Combining speed breeding with other state-of-the-art technologies, such as gene editing, is the best way to create a pipeline of new crops, according to the researchers. Dr Hickey said that his team is talking about creating plant factories on a massive scale.
"A new era in plant research has arrived," says Charlie Brummer, Director of the Plant Breeding Center at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the work. Breeders and breeding companies have always tried to minimize the time it takes to develop a new variety of crops, but with new technologies like speed breeding, who said that they cannot do it better now than they did in the past.
Botanists first started growing plants under artificial light, carbon arc lamps 150 years ago. Since then, advances in LED technology have vastly improved the accuracy with which scientists can adjust and customize light settings to individual crop species. Researchers have also adopted new genetic techniques to optimize flowering times and make plants more resistant to the rigours of a warming planet. Unlike older crossbreeding and crop modification techniques, more modern tools like Crispr allow scientists to snip out portions of the plant's DNA that may make it vulnerable to disease. Dr. Hickey and his team are working on adding Crispr machinery directly into barley and sorghum saplings, on modifying the plants' genes while simultaneously speed breeding them.
This is easier said than done for some crops. Potatoes and some other plants, such as alfalfa are tetraploids, carrying four copies of each chromosome. (Humans and most animals are diploid, with two chromosomes, one from each parent). A breeder might want to delete one gene that decreases crop yield, but there may be three more copies of the gene on the plant's other chromosomes.
This unique inheritance pattern means that potatoes are typically sterile, and must be propagated by harvesting them and replanting tubers. Speed breeding and genetic editing can only fast-track propagation to a certain extent, said Benjamin Stich, a plant geneticist at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany.
Dr. Stich and his team are developing a technique called genomic prediction to fast-track the identification of tubers with desirable traits. First, the researchers take what they know about how various genes influence growth and yield. Then, they input that data into computer models and extract predictions about which plants will have the best combination of genes and yield in the field. Dr. Stich said that they can now predict many traits simultaneously with high reliability. His team has used the technique to successfully predict tubers' susceptibility to potato blight, as well as their starch content, yield and time to maturity.
With cheaper and more powerful technology, opportunities are opening up to improve crops around the world. Dr. Hickey's team plans to train plant breeders in India, Zimbabwe and Mali over the next couple years through a collaboration with the International Crops. Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics and grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Lee Hickey, a plant geneticist of University of Queensland in Australia said that they face a great challenge in terms of feeling the world, and according to statistics the world will have about 10 billion people on the planet by 2050, which means 60 to 70 percent more food will be needed to feed everyone. He also claimed that this is a more significant challenge in the face of climate change and diseases that affect our crops that are also rapidly rising.
But plant breeding is a slow process. Developing new kinds of crops, higher yield, more nutritious, drought-and-disease-resistant can take a decade or more, using traditional breeding techniques. So plant breeders are working on increasing the pace.
Dr. Hickey's team has been working on "speed breeding," tightly controlling light and temperature to send plant growth into an overdrive. This enables researchers to harvest seeds and start growing the next generation of crops sooner. Inspired by NASA research on how to grow food on space stations, their technique tricks the crops into the flowering stage early by blasting blue and red LED lights 22 hours a day and setting the temperatures between 672 degrees Fahrenheit. Last November, in a paper in Nature, they showed that they could produce up to six generations of wheat, barley, chickpeas and canola in a year, whereas traditional methods would only yield one or two.
On Monday in Nature Biotechnology, Dr. Hickey and his team highlight the potential of speed breeding, as well as other techniques that may help improve food security. Combining speed breeding with other state-of-the-art technologies, such as gene editing, is the best way to create a pipeline of new crops, according to the researchers. Dr Hickey said that his team is talking about creating plant factories on a massive scale.
"A new era in plant research has arrived," says Charlie Brummer, Director of the Plant Breeding Center at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the work. Breeders and breeding companies have always tried to minimize the time it takes to develop a new variety of crops, but with new technologies like speed breeding, who said that they cannot do it better now than they did in the past.
Botanists first started growing plants under artificial light, carbon arc lamps 150 years ago. Since then, advances in LED technology have vastly improved the accuracy with which scientists can adjust and customize light settings to individual crop species. Researchers have also adopted new genetic techniques to optimize flowering times and make plants more resistant to the rigours of a warming planet. Unlike older crossbreeding and crop modification techniques, more modern tools like Crispr allow scientists to snip out portions of the plant's DNA that may make it vulnerable to disease. Dr. Hickey and his team are working on adding Crispr machinery directly into barley and sorghum saplings, on modifying the plants' genes while simultaneously speed breeding them.
This is easier said than done for some crops. Potatoes and some other plants, such as alfalfa are tetraploids, carrying four copies of each chromosome. (Humans and most animals are diploid, with two chromosomes, one from each parent). A breeder might want to delete one gene that decreases crop yield, but there may be three more copies of the gene on the plant's other chromosomes.
This unique inheritance pattern means that potatoes are typically sterile, and must be propagated by harvesting them and replanting tubers. Speed breeding and genetic editing can only fast-track propagation to a certain extent, said Benjamin Stich, a plant geneticist at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany.
Dr. Stich and his team are developing a technique called genomic prediction to fast-track the identification of tubers with desirable traits. First, the researchers take what they know about how various genes influence growth and yield. Then, they input that data into computer models and extract predictions about which plants will have the best combination of genes and yield in the field. Dr. Stich said that they can now predict many traits simultaneously with high reliability. His team has used the technique to successfully predict tubers' susceptibility to potato blight, as well as their starch content, yield and time to maturity.
With cheaper and more powerful technology, opportunities are opening up to improve crops around the world. Dr. Hickey's team plans to train plant breeders in India, Zimbabwe and Mali over the next couple years through a collaboration with the International Crops. Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics and grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.